Back from another productive day at the workshop space... I'm up to 640 parts cut, with another 60 or so to go (which I'm tracking to complete next week). Still lots to do though, each and every one gets additional work on a table or hand router, sanded a bit, and then painted and clear-coated.

New pooter! Well, new to me. The last one died Friday May 31, and it took the local Wizard until yesterday to figure out that it was not worth repairing. And he still did not know what was wrong, but he was ready to try a new mother board. Instead I got him to sell me a newer tower for a few bucks.

Otherwise all well here. In fact, very well. I've gotten a lot done outside in the last few days, partly thanks to lovely weather. Took out a dying tree, cut other firewood, organized the attic in the barn (so much space now!), prepping a tricycle for the next Kinetic Race (lower gearing for v-e-r-y steep hill in Klamath Falls).

Remember... I was mentoring a high school kid for the Kinetic Race on Memorial weekend? His family has gifted me a giant 5th wheel camping trailer. Sure, it "needs work", but the price is right and the tires are new. Just need to get it home. I have a 5th wheel hitch, but my truck is so small. This trailer is huge! But somebody has the right tractor for it.
Don't know if I will use it for camping in addition to Millicent The Bus, or tear it down and use the chassis to haul Stuff. But I have room to keep it until I decide. Maybe install the slide-out room in Millicent?

New pooter! Well, new to me. The last one died Friday May 31, and it took the local Wizard until yesterday to figure out that it was not worth repairing. And he still did not know what was wrong, but he was ready to try a new mother board. Instead I got him to sell me a newer tower for a few bucks.

Otherwise all well here. In fact, very well. I've gotten a lot done outside in the last few days, partly thanks to lovely weather. Took out a dying tree, cut other firewood, organized the attic in the barn (so much space now!), prepping a tricycle for the next Kinetic Race (lower gearing for v-e-r-y steep hill in Klamath Falls).

Remember... I was mentoring a high school kid for the Kinetic Race on Memorial weekend? His family has gifted me a giant 5th wheel camping trailer. Sure, it "needs work", but the price is right and the tires are new. Just need to get it home. I have a 5th wheel hitch, but my truck is so small. This trailer is huge! But somebody has the right tractor for it.
Don't know if I will use it for camping in addition to Millicent The Bus, or tear it down and use the chassis to haul Stuff. But I have room to keep it until I decide. Maybe install the slide-out room in Millicent?

Don't know. But you have a full size truck, right? Maybe a 3/4? Mine's just a "baby" Dodge Dakota. I've pulled a smaller 5th wheel trailer with it just fine, but this new one is twice that size. Do you have the 5th wheel? Brake controller? If you have an errand down this way we might be able to combine. I would pay for fuel, of course. Go to PM.

*wanders in, makes CCC*
Yeah Elliot, I have a 3/4 ton Ford and a one ton dually Dodge, both 4x4 diesels.
no 5th wheel though, but the Ford had one at one time, so, something should be able to be worked out. I do have brake controllers on both.
Or, depending on the length of the trailer, I could put it on my equipment trailer and haul it.
I need no "errand" down that way, to help a Pal in need.

HI MDF!! so glad to hear you're having a good day!! you deserve tons of them! yay you!

Hi ^Rhino!!
good to hear work is cooperating with your vacation schedule!!

I'm "off to the Hof" today, to hopefully finish hooking up the Hofstove, and, level the floor material inside, hoping maybe an hour or so of "floor granite jigsaw puzzle" could be played when folks are up there, it'd be so cool if it had the "touch" of others, laying their own patterns or whatever in the granite.

You see, I had a similar job dropped on me in November 2009 with no warning, only that one was HUGE. It was literally 6 miles long, an engineering soil survey for route relocation through tough, tough country...up and down hills and three river crossings. The first river crossing was dead level, and then the fun began. I swore to myself, that NOTHING would get between me and BRC, so I launched myself into the job with a vengance forthe remaining six miles.

Things kept 'attaching themselves' to the job. A University wanted to do a research project associating itself with the borings I was doing. OK, OK, I said. It cost an additional three weeks. Then, they didn't give me a final report on their project, so I took their geophysical data and ran with it. It worked out my way even better....I discovered a new and previously unmapped fault in the area near a critical junction. Cool.

Finally, on July 31 2010 it was done. Finis. I cleared all the paperwork before I left for BRC. It meant that I had NO work remaining when I got back.

But when I got back, I had two new soil surveys and over 300 e-mails to deal with. 'Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends....we're so glad you could attend, now back to work, back to work....There's rockfall work galore, and just so you don't snore, there's samples by the score for you to collect, to collect...."

But I still get the last laugh. They promoted me into lower management, and I'd never had my sense of humor surgically removed.

Morning gang. still not working but trying to get up early so as not to get out of the habit. Sadly everybody is now asking for a cscs card for my kind of work which means i need to do a course on health and safety, which is basically teaching what to ignore if i want to get the job done. 'le sigh. well it will be back home soon and i can just ignore that shit for a few months.

FREE THE SHERPAS
Burners with torches is right and natural and just.-fishy.
CATCH AND RELEASE.

And I didn't even get to give the story's postscript. The fault I discovered is now in full view. I put my reputation on the line when I got strike and dip measurements on it from a combination of airphoto lineations and the geophysics trace. I was exactly correct on the strike, and within a half-degree on the dip. Plus, since it's new, I'm going to Denver for the annual meeting of the American Institute of Professional Geologists and giving a presentation on the new fault to introduce it. The trip is paid for. Thank goodness it's AFTER BRC.

*strolls in, makes CCC, taps AFG*
HI MDF!! glad good is on you!!
Wow ^Rhino.........all good stuff. "livin the dream", yay you!! I wish you were near here, our "gold country/motherload" geology is complex and interesting, richest gold producing area in the world at and around the gold rush of '49.

well, I may have a sick child in Colorado, while on vacation, so may be making a rush trip back there to pick her up. She can't fly, so that's not an option.

Go get'em Grai! Good luck. Morning MDF, ASD, Mart! Rhino, you rock! Ouch YG, that is a passel of driving. Maybe fly there and rent a car for the trip back?? Hi Lucky, see ya in about a week! We'll all be checking out YG's Hof stove and gazing at Bowman Lake! Yay!

Happy Friday, and happy solstice everyone! Here's hoping today's better than yesterday - my whole Thursday morning was a string of obstacles and upsets. Started off with early word that some weekend meeting sessions happening next week with a project I help on... was going to require my presence. WTF? Weekend meetings heading into crunch mode aren't unheard of, but I'm more of an outside consultant on that kind of thing and it's highly unusual to be invited, let alone required to attend. It's an honor, but doesn't feel like one. Then, heading to my workshop place to build ziggurat parts... massive traffic and construction. Get everything loaded only to find things are first delayed, and then my session's got to be canceled because equipment went down. So reload the stuff back in the van, deal with even more traffic, then of course there's no nearby parking, and once I do find a spot I realize I left my USB key (with my files and stuff on it) at the workshop. D'oh!

Clearly I needed to take a different approach to the day, it was determined to thwart my attempts at productivity. I made my way back over to the workshop, and then zipped on up to the mission (SF neighborhood), where my bacon food truck buddy was having his first day at a new storefront location. The place was doing pretty good business but he was glad to see me (his biz has had a bunch of crazy setbacks this year that would have ended things for a lot of companies), we played a bit of catchup and talked about junk ranging from mobile foodie culture to future plans. Then I grabbed some food to go, and took it home to surprise Pandorra (she was working from home). There still wasn't any parking, and I ended up having to bounce between a couple different 2hr limit spots before finally finding someplace close by to put the van.

Last night I distracted myself by diving into word cloud stuff. I was fascinated by the pic Bravo from placement had put together, and wanted to use it to make a piece of art to display at our camp. He had kindly sent me his original file, but of course because yesterday the universe wasn't letting anything get by, the file wasn't usable for what I wanted to do. That led me down a few different paths and took forever, but I've got two word cloud sets to work with.

Happy birthday to the away-from-message-board mgb327 (he's off in Vegas to see Fatboy Slim). Between that and the solstice, it seems right to share one of my all-time favorite summer songs (and a really infectious earworm)...

[media]

While you're watching that, I'm going to sneak off and try and get something productive done

aserendipity, I never ever trust all my eggs to numerical analysis, especially when lives and property are at stake.

The Colorado Rockfall Simulation Program was originally developed by the Colorado School of Mines in conjunction with Colorado DOT to address rockfall problems in the wilds of Glenwood Canyon on I-70. True to intent, when it was in testing, Colorado DOT workers used to ascend the hills with loads of boulders to roll down slopes so that the program could be calibrated to see just how accurate it was. Once calibrated, it became a powerful predictive tool to determine where a rockfall fence or other protective structure could be placed to prevent rockfall.

And then, in an area in which the protective structures were erected and functioning as intended, a fault gave way midway up a hill. The resultant landslide blew through the rockfall fences like bullets through tissue paper and closed I-70 for months.

If you're going to do the geology, you do it right. Look at the surface and the subsurface both, and integrate the results as a package. Trust nobody else's data, you don't know where or how they got it. Field verification, testing of multiple working hypotheses, and time spent are ALL part of it.

Yggy, I'm well aware of the gold in them thar hills. Barrick and Newmont seem to make an annual event of trying to entice me away from my current job if I even stop in Battle Mountain or Elko. No thanks- I'm much happier in an area where grass grows, the trees are shady, the wine flows from the wineries all along the river, and where a new adventure awaits me at every bend in the road. Many nights, I'll find a city park, a park bench, and sit and watch the world go by, thankful that I have a small part in it. Plus, we have the St. Louis Cardinals, who are pretty damn good most years.